Helen Butler Wells

Born 1854 in USA. Died 1940 in USA.

It is within the spiritualist wave that swept through Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century that Helen Butler Wells found her spiritualist group called „Jansen“ in New York. She communicated with the spirits of famous personalities – introduced by her son who died at an early age – among others with Bishop Jansen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pythagoras, Tecumseh, and a large group of Native Americans as well as visitors from the planets Jupiter and Mars. Under their influence, she created numerous automatic drawings, some of which she signed as “Instrument Number 1”. In 1919, a new spirit took over her mind, an artist from the court of Alphonse the IIIrd named Eswald, who guided her hand to produce drawings with pencil, inspired by Art Nouveau, marked not only by the Symbolist atmosphere, but also by references to fairy tales and illustrations of fantastic literature. Created in a single stroke, these drawings, metamorphosed in volutes then writings, provoke a hypnotical effect and take us into a strange world.